In this blog I talk about some of the personal programming I do as a hobby. By trade I'm a Java and database developer but I've dabbled in Haskell, front-end development, etc. I'm currently working as an architect but still enjoy getting my fingers dirty in code!

Saturday, January 21, 2017

So long Haskell, and thanks for all the functional fish

I've realized I haven't written or read a line of Haskell in the past 6 months. After roughly ten years of tinkering with it, it seems that I've given up on it. There is a big obvious reason, and other smaller ones.

Professionally, my job got a lot more challenging (I'm officially an **architect** now, which means I still write lots of code but I have to draw pretty diagrams too (-: ) and involves a lot of research and learning new stuff, things like microservices, docker, messaging, Angular2, mobile apps, etc. So a lot of my time is dedicated to work or to learning for work, so I don't have the time to play around with something quite unrelated like Haskell.

I suppose to be honest there also was a bit of lassitude with Haskell. I got tired of the less than optimal IDEs, I realized Haskell was not going to get me a great job, and there were a few little skirmishes on the web that got ugly and made me see the community in a less favorable light.

This was fun, though, and I certainly learned a lot, and I hope it has made me a better programmer. A lot of my coding now is done in Java 8, and it's good to be able to apply some functional idioms practiced in Haskell, and more general ideas like data immutability, small pure functions do help make better - more testable, easier to understand - code.

So maybe I'll come back to Haskell some day, but not for now. To all the open source projects I've contributed, I wish you the best!

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